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Help with water texture

I am currently trying to map something out for a pirate's campaign. Things were going along just fine until I got to the water. The problem I find is that I can't get a water texture that looks good. I know there are tutorials on water textures but they are all for water at close views primarily in the city sized map range. How does one go about making water look realistic at regional levels?

I tried using a low setting bas relief overlay followed by a bit of added noise. However, it still doesn't look right to me. Any ideas on how to fix it?

Filter -> Render -> Lighting 5 omni's, each in a corner, one in the center with settings: Intensity 6, Gloss -100, Material 100, Exposure 0, Ambience 10, Texture Channel Red, White is high, and slider all the way to mountainous.

Duplicate the layer, set one at screen and one at multiply at about 30 opacity. And add a outer glow.

I thought that your deep water looked fine but its the land sea interface thats a bit out. It looks like the land sits on top floating over the water. If you have a height map of the terrain then you can do some texturing based on the depth of the water. Otherwise a thin line of beaches, rocks or cliffs and some undersea aqua colored tints to bring out the sandy floor is about all you can do.

I thought that your deep water looked fine but its the land sea interface thats a bit out. It looks like the land sits on top floating over the water. If you have a height map of the terrain then you can do some texturing based on the depth of the water. Otherwise a thin line of beaches, rocks or cliffs and some undersea aqua colored tints to bring out the sandy floor is about all you can do.

I only have height maps of the mountains and hills. However, I could make one for the sea. Any thoughts on how best to overlay that so it looks natural?

The problem is that everything starts to look patterned when filling large amounts of sea space. The first step I usually do is to make a new cloud layer on top, select > color range > use black then hide this cloud layer and go back to the "waves" layer (not the sea blue layer) and hit the delete key. This takes out big chunks of waves and leaves us with flat places and textured places and looks more random than the straight up layer filled to the brim with texture. Then I do up another layer for the green bits around the coast and crop out everything after a certain distance. The method mentioned by Woekan looks like it's taken from my tutorial on making a continent (with some edits but essentially the same) so give that a look see.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)